If you're not on the Facebook, you might try it out for some entertainment and enlightenment.

The great benefit of Facebook is that you can keep track of your friends and never see them. For a semi-recluse like myself, that's a blessing.

I "friend" just about anybody who requests that I add him/her to my list, whether I know that person or not. A couple of exceptions: I don't "friend" people who aren't local. I don't friend people I don't know with whom I have no mutual friends.

You can read some funny stuff on the Facebook. For instance, one of my Facebook friends who I know in person only slightly has been posting that his girlfriend is kicking him out of the house and that he is headed toward homelessness.

"I've been homeless before," he wrote. "It isn't to bad. Better than the drama around here."

A couple of days later the young guy who is headed toward homelessness (works only part-time and doesn't make a great deal of money) and doesn't even have a car he can sleep in wrote that he was feeling great because he had just put a new screen on his laptop.

Huh?

That's what I said to myself.

Huh?

This guy has been homeless and is headed toward homelessness again. He's got no money. He's got no car.

But he has a laptop. With a brand new screen.

I own a bulky desktop computer that's about 10 years old. I've got two jobs, and I can't afford a laptop. I can't even afford a screen for a laptop.

It's a chore, but I try to look on the bright side of things, believe it or not, so I sought a silver lining and I found it: In this great land of ours, even the poorest among us who can't afford a home, a car or a girlfriend can still afford to have a laptop computer with a nice screen to view. That's the sign of a prosperous nation, folks, when the poor people have more computing power at their fingertips than major universities had when I was a young man and carried a slide-rule instead of a computer.

My two conclusions: 1.) We are still a prosperous nation. 2.) I'm not going to worry about homeless people any more.